Jurassic World: Maisie Lockwood Adventures 2 – The Yosemite Six

Tess Sharpe's The Yosemite Six is a Jurassic World adventure for 8 year olds about a girl who tracks a missing raptor into the mountains and ends up somewhere much scarier. School.

What happens

This is the second Maisie Lockwood Adventures book. Maisie lives on the road in a camper van called Pumpkin with Owen and Claire, rescuing dinosaurs before the poachers get to them. Now Blue the raptor's tracker has stopped moving deep in Yosemite, and nobody knows why.

So it's a two-day hike into the freezing High Sierra, with bear spray tucked in Maisie's backpack. What they find by the lake is Blue's tracker, buried in the sand. Someone has cut it out.

Over the next hill, six dinosaurs are grazing in a hidden valley. An Ankylosaurus, three Apatosauruses, a Gallimimus running in circles and a lonely Parasaurolophus. They're being kept there on purpose. A ranger and her friends are secretly hiding dinosaurs in the national parks, and winter is coming fast.

Then comes the twist Maisie really didn't see coming. To stay in the park and help, the grown-ups need to blend in. So Maisie is off to school for the very first time!

She treats it like an undercover mission (and decides to write it up as an anthropology study of her new middle school). It's funny and quite touching. She can face down a raptor, but a classroom full of kids who might laugh at her is another thing entirely.

Maisie is great company. She's curious and brave and full of facts (did you know mist from a waterfall can freeze into a sort of creek slushie?). You also feel how much she wants a proper family, and how Owen and Claire have quietly become one.

There's peril, but it's the adventure kind. Poachers are a worry in the background, and the rangers have found deer that something took down. They're only talked about, never shown.

If you've got a dinosaur fan who's also nervous about starting somewhere new, this mix is spot on.

What to read next

If they haven't met Maisie yet, start with Off the Grid, where she's been living in Pumpkin with Owen and Claire for nearly two years and they're still chasing sightings of Blue.